Songs by Bulat Okudzhava

About Okudzhava

The melodies are traditional, the three-to-five chord harmony is modest, the style of the guitar accompaniment simple and unpretentious, yet in spite of all this the music in Okudzhava's songs is not just a kind of neutral background, not simply a means of transmitting the message of poetry to the listener or an amplifier of its emotional impact. It performs a more precise and complicated job. The music often acts as a flexible and sensitive partner of the poetic word - it surrounds it with a special emotional atmosphere. The music can elevate or romanticize the word's sound, or with the help of an ironic tone, balance and temper excessive feeling which would burst out of the poem. It enriches the word with new colour, gives rise to additional shades of meaning, and forms its own kind of counterpoint to the movement of the poem, achieving a certain verbally-transcendent semantic plan. The music combines with the word in an intricate, whimsical game, advancing both as a helper and as a rival; it excites the imagination of the listener, alluding to that which is not fully said in the poem, to implications harboured between the lines.